Do Not Track – Not For Me

I finished my undergraduate degree as the Internet boom started to hit its stride, but after several entrepreneurs had already started and sold companies for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. When I started school, Netscape didn’t exist, but a browser named Mozilla did, and not long after a certain directory had launched. Sometime during the summer of my junior year, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who had taken a job with Covad communications helping install fiber optic lines so more people could have broad band access. My surfing at the time consisted of the chat rooms on AOL, my focus not on what one could create but instead whether my innuendo laden chats took place with a real woman as opposed to someone pretending to be. As he told me about his stock value from his summer job and friends he knew being offered 70k right out of school to do programming, he said something else that has stuck with me for almost ten years, a comment just now seeing its time.

Online ads had existed for less than two years, an entire industry had just started being considered an industry but already my friend mentioned how he worried about tracking and privacy. As one who always seemed ahead of his time and especially given his experience working for an Internet enabler, he knew or had a grasp of the transparency of our surfing habits and speculated that our data at some point could become a liability. Offhandedly, he remarked how at some point in the future, he might have to avoid visiting certain sites, such as one on sky diving, because it could lead to his insurance rates increasing, the implication being that the insurance companies will purchase user data to make business decisions. Well, we haven’t hit the point where an insurance company will use surfing behavior to make policy decisions; although, we have reached a point where they can use surfing behavior to target individuals interesting in sky diving in case they want to promote a new life insurance plan. And, the companies that help them do that, from ad networks to the specialized behavioral targeting shops have found themselves in a desirable position.

For as much as things change, so much seems to remain the same. Flash back to 1999, and Doubleclick once again made headlines regarding privacy and an acquisition. Back then it also revolved around an acquisition, their $1.7 billion merger with market research Abacus, which opened the door for non-personally identifiable information collected by Doubleclick to become tied with the offline, personally identifiable information from Abacus. If memory serves correct, the plan to enhance online data using offline information never materialized as the companies seemed to sense their being ahead of their time. Eight years later, the exact plan has surfaced again, as an offline data company not only purchased an online behavioral targeting firm but has rolled out an offering that combines that with their offline data. And, showing that they have learned from the ongoing discourse around targeting and privacy, the company said neither data contains personally identifiable information.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from increased levels of targeting comes the notion of no targeting at all. Some consumer advocates have, for instance, pushed hard for a parallel concept to the federal do not call registry to exist for online, the not yet official or live do not track list. Unlike calls though, you can’t fully escape ads, certainly not if you want to continue to enjoy the rapidly developing, free nature of the web. Take away the targeting, and you decrease the yields; decrease the yields and you lower what people make. Thus, the do not track has the real potential to cause more harm than good. This hasn’t stopped AOL though from trying to establish itself as a leader in consumer privacy. They have announced that they will allow users the opportunity to opt-out of tracking, a big decision for a company that has spent hundreds of millions on acquiring companies that specialize in tracking. While it makes sense, like the do not track notion, allowing consumers to link annoying phone calls with targeted ads will ultimately hurt everyone.

Ironically enough, the almost ten year old example regarding surfing habits and insurance companies came up at the recent FTC town hall meeting on privacy. In discussing privacy and targeting with another of my friends, certain aspects of the debate started to seem more understandable. Our surfing habits make up our private online behavior. We as people don’t like adware as it violates not the technical definition of privacy but our personal definition of it. We don’t want anyone having access to history files; for the most part we chose to go where we did, but everyone has the one or two sites that make up their guilty pleasure or simply a surfing accident that we don’t want as part of the targeting algorithms. We take less offense to cookie tracking in general because it falls into out of site out of mind. Contextual ads receive much more flak because of their often unintended placements – luggage on a plane crash article – which if anything should only make the case for better targeting.

In contrast to what we might almost call targeting 1.0, using information from our private surfing, targeting 2.0, which Facebook offers in scale but others have long discussed since the advent of user generated content, relies on our public information. Go to a site like Rapleaf (who had their own share of privacy flare-ups) or Spock to see one use of your public information. Both sites tell you about you (or anyone else that has public information), and at first you might find the experience unnerving. If you do, it’s your own fault in a way as they just take what you say about you, with the exception of Rapleaf that allows others to then comment to your collective data. Imagine the experience though, if the data came from your behavioral surfing as opposed to what you knowingly put online.

That you can control what ads you see perhaps by altering what you say about yourself should hold a lot of promise for the future. It doesn’t quite act the same as choosing what ads you do and don’t want to see, but it takes a lot of the mystery out of it. In addition, it also makes the idea of targeting truly meaningful. As it’s election time, think about a candidate that wants to reach potential voters. Using 2.0 methodology they can find people that either fit certain criteria – maybe political party or other candidates endorsed. Targeting people based on surfing behavior will simply mean hitting either a less focused group or too focused. And, from the direct marketing perspective it is what might bridge the gap between brands and wide spread performance marketing adoption. And, once a Facebook allows for that information about you to carry to non-Facebook sites, then they have something truly powerful.